Election Day is Tuesday. A life coach in Arkansas and a toy company founder in California say their faith shapes the way they size up a candidate. The Virtuous Creative’s ongoing survey and federal data show the pressures behind their concerns.
Cassandra Hill has a simple test for anyone asking for her vote.
“When evaluating a candidate, it’s important to me that they operate with integrity,” said Hill, a life coach based in Arkansas. “So many candidates claim to be Christian while intentionally inflicting harm on the most vulnerable segments of the population.”
Shaneisha Dodson, founder of Brilliant Girl, a California company that makes children’s toys and dolls, described a similar standard. “I’m always looking for people who are going to do the right thing,” she said. “Someone who is actually trying to make the world a better place by helping those in need. Not just lining the pockets of the super rich.”
With Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 3, their answers show how tightly business, family, faith and community concerns overlap. The Virtuous Creative’s ongoing survey of Christian women entrepreneurs points to the economic pressure underneath.
Watching the economy from the owner’s side
For Hill, running a business changes how she listens to candidates.
“As an entrepreneur, I pay special attention to the economy,” she said. “During economic hard times, it is natural to experience some decline in business.”
Depending on how severe the economic challenges get, she said, she’s listening for whether representatives treat support for small businesses as a priority. On the business side, she’s worried about a decline in people’s ability to afford services.
Dodson sees it differently. She said owning a business doesn’t change what she pays attention to politically. In her view, the issues she cares about most, homelessness and affordability, are problems her state needs to fix.
California counted 181,934 people experiencing homelessness in January 2025, down 2.8% from 2024 but still about a quarter of the national total of 745,652, according to federal point-in-time figures reported by CalMatters.
What The Virtuous Creative’s survey shows
Answers to The Virtuous Creative’s ongoing survey of Christian women entrepreneurs line up with Hill’s worry about clients’ budgets.
Of the 30 women who have responded so far, 20 said generating consistent revenue is one of their biggest challenges, the most common answer. Thirteen said the same about access to funding or capital. Half reported annual revenue under $10,000 or said they hadn’t started earning yet.
Most run lean. Twenty-two of the 30 work alone or with one or two contractors or part-time helpers.
Even so, hope held up. Twenty-four described themselves as very or cautiously optimistic about their businesses, and six said they were uncertain but pressing forward. None said they were struggling to stay hopeful.
A customer base under pressure
Dodson’s biggest question for candidates connects directly to the people who buy from Brilliant Girl.
Black women are her target customers, and she’s concerned about how many have lost their jobs in recent years.
“I would like to know the plan to help these women get back in the workforce in positions where they are paid fairly for their skill set,” she said.
Her concern is backed by the numbers, and the losses have stretched across two years.
Black women lost about 251,000 jobs between January and August 2025 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to a 2026 report from the National Council of Negro Women, which noted the figure was revised down from the roughly 300,000 widely reported at the time. Black women also lost 95,371 federal positions during 2025, more than 30% of their federal employment, the report found. Their employment rate fell 1.4 percentage points that year, to 55.7%, one of the sharpest one-year drops in 25 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Losses continued into 2026. Between the March and July jobs reports, employment among Black women fell by about 212,000, and the number outside the labor force grew by about 454,000, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Katica Roy published in Fortune. Their unemployment rate dropped during those months, because women who stop looking for work aren’t counted as unemployed.
September brought a sharp turn. Unemployment for Black women 20 and older jumped from 5.6% in August to 6.8% in September, according to BLS data analyzed by the National Women’s Law Center. Black unemployment overall rose at its fastest pace since 2020, CNN reported. October’s jobs report comes out Nov. 6, three days after the election.
Some of those women are turning to entrepreneurship. Black women-owned employer businesses grew 13% between 2024 and 2025, according to Wells Fargo’s annual Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report, as reported by Yahoo Finance. Wells Fargo cautioned that part of that growth reflects necessity, with women starting businesses after being pushed out of traditional jobs, NCNW noted.
Medicare, Social Security and seniors going hungry
Hill’s family concerns center on older Americans: rising Medicare premiums and potential cuts to Social Security. Standard Medicare Part B premiums rose to $202.90 a month in 2026, up 9.7% from $185 in 2025, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Social Security’s trustees project the trust fund for retirement and survivor benefits will run out of reserves in late 2032, when incoming revenue would cover 78% of scheduled benefits unless Congress acts, according to their 2026 report.
She’s also worried about senior hunger in her state.
“Arkansas is one of the top states in the U.S. in regard to senior hunger,” Hill said. “With the rising costs of food and federal cutbacks, some seniors are unable to feed themselves adequately.”
National data backs her up. Arkansas ranks 49th among states, second-worst in the nation, for food insecurity among adults 60 and older, at 13.2%, according to America’s Health Rankings, using 2023 data. In January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s final household food security report named Arkansas the hungriest state for the third year in a row, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. USDA canceled the annual survey behind those numbers, making that report the last of its kind, according to NCNW.
In her community, Hill wants candidates to talk about access to healthcare. Enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits expired Jan. 1, 2026, and KFF estimates average annual premium payments for subsidized marketplace enrollees would rise 114%, from $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026. New Medicaid work requirements take effect Jan. 1, 2027. Arkansas tried similar requirements before, and evaluations found significant coverage losses with no measurable change in employment, NCNW noted.
Policing and domestic violence
Police violence is top of mind for Hill. She described an incident in which a police chief slapped and choked a man who uses a wheelchair, calling it “really unacceptable.”
Her description matches a case in Osceola, Arkansas. In April, video showed then-Police Chief Robert “Bobby” Ephlin slapping Danarius Williams, a paraplegic man, and putting him in a headlock, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and WREG. Ephlin resigned, and Arkansas State Police declined to investigate, Action News 5 reported.
Hill also said women’s rights are a concern for her, particularly domestic violence. She said one in two Arkansas women experiences domestic violence and that shelters across the state have closed as federal money dried up.
“I will be paying attention to who cares about this issue,” she said.
Nearly half of Arkansas women, 48%, have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to CDC survey data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg American Health Initiative.
Hill tied the shelter crisis to cuts under the Violence Against Women Act. The full picture involves two federal funding streams.
On VAWA, the administration proposed cutting the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women by about 29% for fiscal 2026, from $713 million to $505.5 million, Roll Call reported. Congress rejected the cut and funded the programs at $720 million, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence. But as of April, at least $204 million of the office’s fiscal 2025 money still hadn’t reached the groups that depend on it, according to an analysis by The 19th.
Arkansas shelters have taken their hardest hit from a second source, the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA, which is funded by fines and penalties paid by offenders. Arkansas’s VOCA allocation fell from about $15.4 million in 2020-21 to $7.3 million in 2024-25, according to state figures reported by KATV. For the 2025-26 cycle, 111 organizations requested about $18.6 million, and 54 received money from the state’s $9.1 million allocation, KHBS reported.
Shelters have felt it fast. River Valley Shelter in Russellville cut its staff from nine to two and its beds from 16 to two, the Arkansas Traveler reported. Saline County Safe Haven in Benton cut three positions and warned in February it could close, KARK reported. Compassions Foundation in Magnolia launched a Save Our Shelter campaign after losing more than $242,000 in VOCA support, according to the shelter.
A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration told KHBS the amounts vary with collections and that it “would not be accurate” to call lower amounts cuts.
What ties their answers together
Neither woman mentioned a political party. Both described a candidate’s treatment of the most vulnerable people as a measure of character, whether those people are seniors going hungry, women leaving abusive homes or workers trying to get back into jobs that pay what they’re worth.
For Hill and Dodson, faith is less a label a candidate claims and more a question of who a candidate’s choices help.
Polls close Tuesday, Nov. 3.
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